FontLab Studio and High Sierra

I’ve run into a serious issue with FontLab Studio (build 5714) after upgrading to High Sierra -- everything seems to work fine *except* the ability to paste or append glyphs (which is fairly crucial). I'm still trying to troubleshoot this before conclusively blaming this on High Sierra and was wondering if anyone else has run into this issue.

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I am sorry to say that I can confirm that this is a problem for FontLab Studio 5.1.5 I'm going to go write a blog post right now and publicize it.

I had not heard any other reports, but then again, lots of people don't upgrade instantly to the new version. Our preliminary testing didn't spot such a problem, but this was not immediately obvious without doing that particular operation.

Unfortunately, I can confirm: in macOS 10.13, copying glyphs in the Font Window only copies the glyph name but not the actual glyph data, and copying contours in the Glyph Window only copies the EPS fallback representation but not the native one.

It seems that Apple once again broke something. We'll be investigating but I cannot give a timeframe.

Could you clarify what you mean when you say that only the EPS fallback representation is copied? I've been able to copy and paste contours in the the glyph window and haven't noticed any issues with that, but perhaps I'm missing something.

That's because FLS copies its contour data into the clipboard in its native format and also as EPS, for interchange with e.g. Adobe Illustrator. When pasting, it checks for the native format, and in its absence, for the EPS data (so it can paste something coming from AI). On macOS 10.13, that EPS data is being written but not the native data.

I need to check more details to see what the repercussions are.

Could you go to System Preferences > General, uncheck Allow Handoff (if it's visible in the lower part of the window) and see if this does any change?

Handoff has always been turned off on my system (I have no iOS devices, just a single desktop, so it makes little sense to turn it on).

When I paste a contour, the result seems to be as intended even if it is going through an intermediate EPS stage. I work almost exclusively with postscript contours though, which I assume can be converted more seamlessly than TrueType. Thus far, the only thing which I've now noticed is changing is that tangent points are changing to corner points (which isn't a major problem). Is there any other information present in the native data which cannot be recovered from the EPS data?

On macOS 10.12, using native clipboard format, when you select some contour portion and copy, the corresponding contour portion is being copied from each master. Then, when you paste, each master gets the appropriate contour portion pasted (note the arc in the black master visible in blue):

Since Apple broke something in macOS 10.13 and only the EPS fallback format is used, that format is single-master only. So when I copy, only the contour portion from the current master is copied, and then when I paste, that same contour portion is pasted across all masters (you can see that instead of the thin and the black "B" arcs, the "C" glyph here got the thin arc in both masters):

For single-master PostScript curve contour selections, there shouldn’t be any difference between the FLS5 native and the EPS fallback clipboard format, apart from the tangent-to-corner point conversion (which indeed happens, and it’s sort of by design).

Thanks, Adam, for the detailed explanation. It sounds like I should be safe (albeit a bit crippled by the append glyphs issue).

Unfortunately, I only found the FontLab problem after I encountered an entirely different High Sierra issue -- Time Machine decided it needed to do a complete (~ 6TB) backup from scratch after the upgrade rather than the usual delta backup. Of course, that meant it needed to erase all my previous backups to make space, so I now have no easy way to roll back to Sierra.

Yep. Apple “upgraded” their system clipboard handling in macOS High Sierra to enable “Universal Clipboard 2.0”.

In 2013, I suggested to Apple that they should implement “iCloud Clipboard” (as I called it in my e-mail) where I could copy an image or text on my iPhone or iPad, and then paste it on my Mac — or vice versa.

They found it a good idea and in 2016, macOS Sierra introduced “Universal Clipboard”, which did exactly what I proposed. They even used my feature description nearly unchanged in their marketing materials.

In macOS High Sierra, Apple extended Universal Clipboard to also work between multiple Macs. You can even copy files this way: Cmd+C on one Mac, then Cmd+V on the other.

Actually this idea came to me when my friend Andrzej Tomaszewski told me an anecdote from the time when he worked in an office equipped with Macintoshes in the early 1990s. A woman came to him and said:

“Could you help me, I try to copy a file from one computer to another, and it doesn’t work.”“Oh, how are you trying to achieve this?”“On this computer, I select the file in Finder and press Cmd+C, I go to the other computer, press Cmd+V but nothing happens.”

This story has caused lots of laughter among IT people back then, but when I heard it, I thought “actually, that woman was right!”, and I wrote to Apple.

So this anonymous lady is actually the inventor, and it only took 25 years to implement it.

But when I proposed iCloud Clipboard to Apple four years ago, I did not expect that when they implement it, they will at the same time break the clipboard handling of some existing apps including the one I use daily and co-develop.

There is a cross-platform app called Synergy that allowed you to work on multiple computers placed side by side as if it was one.

When you moved the mouse pointer to the edge of one computer's screen, the pointer appeared on another computer's screen, even if one was a Mac and the other was a Windows PC.

You could use one computer's keyboard to operate anything of the connected machines and the clipboard was also shared. But each computer displayed the content on its own monitor, so it wasn't a "remote desktop" solution, of which there are many and which all are quite slow.

Synergy uses the network only to transmit the mouse movements, keyboard entry and clipboard, so it was very lightweight. The illusion is quite perfect and at the time when I used both a Mac and a PC, I used Synergy for quite some time.

After exchanging information with Apple engineers, we have an initial assessment of the problem (which is indeed a result of the changes in how macOS handles clipboard data). We are still investigating the way in which this problem can be fixed.

Well, I'm assuming by then that FontLab Studio VI will be in non-beta form (right now I'm sticking with FL5 largely because I'm more comfortable with its interface, but also because doing real work in a beta makes me a tad nervous).

(just in case, though, I have my trusty snow-leopard VM for running 32-bit software and PPC software, and SheepShaver for running even older software, and Mini vMac for running *truly* ancient mac software when waxing nostalgic).

Microsoft has a much better record than Apple in catering for users and developers of software in professional markets, including custom-developed software or software that costs several times more than the hardware it runs on.

I have both native and virtualized Windows environments and they allow me to easily run apps from the last three decades, including apps from defunct vendors.

Type design and font development tools are a good example here: I occasionally use pieces of old but still useful software on old Windows, all working fine. On the Mac, I cannot say it's possible.

macOS is a fine OS to work on in terms of UI and graphics, but when it comes to stability for developers, it's terrible.

Every few years Apple changes all of its toolchain, removes things that were previously working fine and forces thousands of developers to rewrite large portions of software from scratch.

This does have the "nice" side-effect that developers may charge users upgrade prices because the older versions of their apps stop working on newer macOS, so users come running. On the other hand, on Windows, apps may run forever so users may not be "pressured" into upgrading so easily.

The additional problem with Apple is that they tend to be very secretive, so as a developer, getting detailed information about why something is not working isn't easy. Microsoft always has been more relaxed and cooperative with software vendors.

As for exit strategies — I might agree that using cross-platform apps which you can run on more than one OS is indeed a decent contingency plan. Using software that is heavily tied into just one software (and hardware) platform always poses a certain risk.